Bombing For Peace

The U.s. Stake In A Faraway Civil War

March 28, 1999|By Storer H. Rowley. Storer H. Rowley is a member of the Tribune's editorial board. He served as a correspondent covering Yugoslavia's civil wars in Croatia and Bosnia.

WASHINGTON — Unsheathing the sword of NATO against Yugoslavia, President Clinton turned to history to justify America's rationale for waging a risky new war over an obscure, faraway place called Kosovo.

Clinton invoked the specters of World War I, World War II and the European Holocaust last week to persuade a skeptical American public that NATO's airstrikes are needed to stop the Serbs from committing more genocide and to prevent the ethnic violence from spreading into a wider Balkans war.

The immediate goal was to degrade Serbian firepower, prevent atrocities and halt a potential "domino effect" that might propel fighting to spill over into neighboring Macedonia and Albania, or even to draw in NATO members Greece and Turkey, potentially destabilizing the alliance's southern flank.

U.S. officials long have viewed Kosovo as "the most explosive tinderbox in the region," as Clinton's veteran peace envoy, Richard Holbrooke, has put it. The region has no end of history lessons the world should heed.

Indeed, the first shots of World War I were fired in the streets of Sarajevo in nearby Bosnia. World War II started after the allies failed to stand up to Hitler's escalating aggression, and the fighting was fierce in the Balkans. The Iron Curtain that descended on Europe during the Cold War stretched into Yugoslavia and nurtured its still unreconstructed Communist leader, Slobodan Milosevic, who has sown havoc long after his Soviet benefactors collapsed.

While invoking the horrors of the past was a clear attempt to explain the high stakes to many Americans who couldn't find Kosovo on a map, Clinton may have strained credulity to some extent. But he was right to hammer home the point that America does have a vital interest in the battle, even if it is merely to show moral leadership, preserve NATO's credibility and avert another humanitarian disaster in the Balkans.

Quite simply, the U.S. alliance with Europe is the most important strategic relationship the United States has. For decades, the U.S. led NATO when it served as the firewall against Soviet expansion in the Cold War. Now, NATO has just been enlarged to include former Soviet allies Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. Welcoming these emerging democracies into the alliance may be viewed as the most important strategic move of the Clinton administration, which aims to allow no more totalitarian lines to be drawn in Europe.

Americans generally think of Europe as a great vacation spot, a giant trading partner, or an ancestral home, if they ponder it at all. But its security is a U.S. national interest, because as NATO's leader, the U.S. is committed to defending Europe as it has in three great conflicts of the 20th Century.

The credibility of the U.S. and NATO was at stake in Kosovo because the alliance threatened military action several times against Milosevic and then failed to act. The moral leadership of the U.S. was also in question. Having vowed after the Holocaust that Americans "never again" would stand for genocide, they stepped aside for four years while Serbs waged a genocidal war in Bosnia. Finally, the U.S. committed peacekeeping forces there. Instability in Kosovo now could well threaten the U.S.-brokered peace in Bosnia.

There are still thousands of U.S. peacekeeping troops policing the truce in Bosnia, where critics feared Americans would be sent home in body bags. Thankfully, not one has, and Bosnia proved that the outside world could do something to halt Balkan bloodshed.

"I don't believe the view that these people have been fighting for 1,000 years and there's nothing we can do to stop them,"said James Pardew, U.S. special representative for military stabilization in the Balkans. "There has to be an end to drawing boundaries in the world according to what church you go to." Serbs are Orthodox Christian, and most Albanians are Muslim.

Americans always support their military men and women once in harm's way, but many in the Republican-controlled Congress, and GOP presidential hopefuls, aren't buying into the logic that America can take effective action to stop Kosovo's war. They cited the perceived lack of an administration exit strategy as proof of their contention that Clinton's foreign policy has been erratic, dithering and lacking in sustained credibility.

But Democrats heralded Operation Allied Force as a diplomatic victory for Clinton, who overcame objections within the 19-member alliance, even as the bombs were falling. Despite the risks, he also bolstered the credibility of U.S. military power and NATO itself as the alliance prepares to celebrate its 50th anniversary next month and to debate a new NATO mission for the next century.

Kosovo and the other ethnic wars of the former Yugoslavia are sure to serve as models of the kinds of threats facing NATO in an unpredictable new world where the Soviet menace has receded only to be replaced by religious or nationalistic conflicts.